


White Harbour

by catherineflowers



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fisherman!Brienne, Fluff and Smut, Runaway!Jaime, Soft Sevenmas Celebrations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:21:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28295238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catherineflowers/pseuds/catherineflowers
Summary: After faking his own death to escape his family, Jaime Lannister can be anyone and do anything.Then, he meets a woman on Sevenmas Eve ...
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 36
Kudos: 207
Collections: JB Festive Festival Exchange 2020





	White Harbour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diesis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diesis/gifts).



> Written for diesis for the Festive Exchange 2020 from her prompts:
> 
> Song: “The blower’s daughter” by Damien Rice  
>  Reunion after a separation  
>  Setting: a harbor on a cold coast 
> 
> I tried to include all of them, though some more loosely than others!

I.

The eighth day after Jaime has been declared officially dead, he ventures out of his motel room.

Only at night, only after the sun goes down, his blond hair dyed brown, tied in a bun and shoved in a hat. His newly-grown beard feels good on his cheeks. It keeps his face nice and warm in the biting cold.

He’s in the north … because who in all the hells would suspect _that_?

Perhaps it will grow on him - it’s not so different here. White Harbour smells the same as Lannisport, and the sounds are exactly the same too – fish and gulls and fishermen. Boats bobbing, the slush of snow beneath his boots, the way his hands burn in the cold.

Gods, he needed some air. He’s stared at the same four walls, the same crap TV set, for nearly a moon. Waiting for the attention to die down, waiting for his family to stop play-acting their grief.

But it’s done. He’s dead – he’s free.

II.

It’s the day before Sevenmas, though he didn’t realise that until about an hour ago. It’s hard to keep track of the date without a smartphone and a desk calendar and things beeping at him to remind him of meetings and deadlines. All he’s known these past few weeks is the endless round of quiz shows, renovation shows, shows about buying antiques that is daytime TV.

After those comes the lunchtime news, news that until a week ago was mostly about him. Pictures of him, handsome, in a suit. Clean-shaven and blond and hopefully unrecognisable from the man he is now.

Footage of planes over the ocean making a fruitless search. Footage of the floating wreckage of his own plane.

Strange how little he felt watching it all. Even the candlelight vigil his family held in the Lannister sept. The lines on his father’s face just make him look more severe. His sister’s tears are fake.

Fuck her – fuck them. It’s done, he’s dead, he’s free.

III.

Jaime takes dinner in a pub on the harbourfront. On one of the tables in the street despite the bite of the icy wind, just so he can smoke, just so he can watch people walking past.

Inside, the bar is packed. It starts to snow.

Jaime heads inside. Sits at the bar, orders a double wildling and coke—drinks it and orders another. No one looks at him much. He’s not Jaime Lannister any more, he’s a scruffy brown-haired man with a bun and a beard drinking in a bar. They’re a dragon-a-dozen all over Westeros, men like him. Men like the man he is now—there are so many men like him.

Behind him, fishermen from the harbour drink and shout and drink some more. Slamming bottles down, singing along to the jukebox. One of them gets up onto a table. Another, a tall bloke in his sixties with wild blue eyes, has his arms around two barmaids. Sevenmas spirit is flowing.

The landlord yells over the jukebox that he’s about to draw the tickets for the Sevenmas meat raffle. Great excitement is expressed by all.

Jaime watches, fascinated. What the fuck is a meat raffle? He’s always been too white-collar to drink in pubs like this.

But he’s free now – he’s dead. There are so many things like this to discover.

IV.

A meat raffle is exactly what it sounds like.

The landlord has a freezer full of meat. The punters buy raffle tickets, they win the meat. Jaime’s transfixed by the whole affair – never before has he seen grown men get so excited about winning a leg of lamb. A pound of sausages. Six serloin steaks.

The old man with the blue eyes wins what looks to Jaime like half a pig. He needs two other fishermen to help him get it over the bar. He carries it aloft in triumph like it’s a footballer who just scored the winning goal.

Jaime watches him, fascinated. He’s hilarious – charismatic, eccentric. Wearing a motheaten coat and a pair of odd wellies.

It takes Jaime another double wildling before he realises one of the fishermen with him is a woman.

Blonde, ruddy-faced, chapped lips. Covered in freckles. She’s wrestled the side of pig onto a chair and is sat beside it, a bottle of beer in her strong, meaty hand. The sleeves of her thick wool jumper are rolled to her elbows, and she has a tattoo on her forearm that Jaime can’t make out all the way over at the bar.

She’s dirty from her day’s work. She has crooked teeth and a broken nose, and she’s probably been thigh-deep in fish all week. Jaime can’t take his eyes off her.

He’s never seen a woman like her – never seen a woman drinking a beer, never seen a woman with dirty fingernails, never seen a woman wearing hobnail boots.

Now she’s shouting at the old man to leave the barmaids alone. He’s pretending he can’t hear her. For a moment, Jaime wonders if she’s his wife or his girlfriend, but when she’s angry, her blue eyes flash just like his.

She’s his daughter. When she stands up to drag her dad off the poor women who are just trying to do their jobs, she’s as tall as him, too. Exceptionally tall, for a woman.

Jaime buys her a drink.

V.

She looks horrified when the barmaid brings it to her. She goes a deep, blotchy red, and her eyes go wide and scared for a moment.

The barmaid points him out. He raises his glass.

He’s bought drinks for women before, of course, though not lately, what with preparing to fake his own death and all. Usually, when it’s happened, the women in question have smiled and waved. Mostly beckoned him over. But then, of course, he was blond and rich; dressed in a designer suit. Then, he was a Lannister, and no one ever rejected him.

This woman rejects him.

Shakes her head, waves the drink away. Gives him a glare of such withering contempt that it almost makes his balls shrivel in his cheap supermarket jeans.

Jaime drinks her beer himself.

VI.

Two more beers and Jaime gets pissed off. Pushes his way through the crowd of carousing fishermen to where the woman is poking at the jukebox.

She turns around. Sees him.

Gods.

Up close, she’s a _lot._

Up close, he’s terrified.

“You don’t want a drink?” he asks. “Why don’t you want a drink?”

She doesn’t reply.

“Do you want to dance, then?”

“You’re not funny,” she says. Her lips set in a sulky scowl.

“Actually, I am,” Jaime tells her. “But I’m not joking _now_. Why won’t you dance? Don’t you like to have fun sometimes? Your dad looks like a fun kind of bloke.”

She glances at her dad, stamping his mismatched wellies to the music, dancing with a pint in each hand. She scoffs.

“Come on,” Jaime says. “Isn’t it Sevenmas tomorrow? I think that’s a good excuse to have some fun.”

“Fun?” She looks back at Jaime, and there is something needy, something hungry, in her gaze.

“We can always dance here,” he says. “If you don’t want to leave the pig unguarded.”

She snorts. “Maybe you are funny.”

He holds out a hand to her. “I told you, I’m not joking.”

VII.

He gets it now.

She’s young – younger than he thought at first, maybe mid-twenties, which puts her at possibly a decade younger than him. Her sea-blasted face makes her look older, at a distance. She has a crack in her lip, a scar on her face. She has the bluest eyes he’s ever seen.

He can see why she was reluctant. She’s soft still, young and soft enough to still get hurt. Maybe someone has hurt her. Maybe everyone has.

She takes his hand and pulls him to the beer-damp dancefloor. Surrounded by heat and sweat and singing and stomping. He gets close – she smells like salt. He puts an arm around her waist to hold her close.

She looks shocked to her core, wary as all the hells.

He smiles at her.

She moves well, for someone so big. As they dance, their bodies touch.

It feels good; he likes her body. It’s a body all the women he knows would try to diet out of, or feel obliged to drown in clothes. It’s a body he’s never seen before, and he likes that.

She seems ... honest. And it’s the first time he’s ever met a woman in an honest way, as a brown-haired man in a bar instead of a golden Lannister with money and potential. He had to die to escape all that. Honest feels good.

“What’s your name?” he yells above the music.

“Brienne,” she yells back.

“Good name,” he tells her. _Brienne_. It rolls on the tongue. “I’m Jaime.”

He shouldn’t be Jaime, he knows. That’s not the name on the fake ID in his wallet, but he doesn’t want to tell the honest woman a lie. Not now. It’s a common enough name anyway, what does it matter?

VIII.

The music is thumping, Jaime is drunk.

Brienne has a hand on his hip and one on his back. They’ve been dancing together for a dozen songs now, but it’s not entirely about the music.

Her thighs are against his. They are strong and sturdy. Her hands are hot through his clothes.

Her body feels good. Unfamiliar and exciting. She likes his body, too, he thinks – her fingers move in small, electrifying circles on his skin. There’s something charged between them every time their eyes meet.

IX.

He wants to make her come.

He’s thinking of it, of how it would be. He could pull her against him, tight so no one can see, open her jeans and slide his hand down to where she would be warm. Wet. He bets she doesn’t wax. She’d be natural there, not bare or a perfectly-groomed landing strip. Gods, he wants her.

It’s the most visceral thing he’s ever felt.

Is this what freedom is? Does it overwhelm you like this, all the choices you can make, all the decisions you have at your fingertips? Does it push you at things and people? Does it make you wild and loose and stupid?

He’s just starting to realise what it means. He’s dead. He’s free.

He’s a dead man with no past and only vast emptiness as a future. He’s made no plans for this part. That excites him.

X.

Brienne kisses him.

She does it quickly – perhaps impulsively. A quick lean down, a quick press of her lips against his. Pulls back to look at his face.

He leans back up to her, lifting himself on his tiptoes to crush his mouth to hers and then …

Then …

 _Oh_.

This is not a kiss that should be done in public. It’s not a kiss that has any decorum, any romance, any finesse. It’s a kiss that’s mostly tongues, it’s eating each other’s faces like teenagers at a disco.

Jaime almost laughs, but he thinks he might choke on her tongue if he does.

Her hands are _everywhere_. On his back, under his sweater on his skin. On his arse, squeezing him against her.

XI.

They aren’t on the dancefloor any more. They are against a wall in the dark by the toilets, pretty much fucking through their clothes. She’s got a leg curled around his hip, and he’s humping against her. She feels good.

“Do you have a condom?” she pants in his ear.

He’s gone, so gone. His whole consciousness is in his dick right now – he has to blink when he opens his eyes. “Wha –?”

“A condom. If – if you want to –”

“Yes! Yes – I want to.”

“Then do you –?”

“No – I don’t. I don’t have any.”

He loves the madness of this, the impulsivity. The anonymity, too. If he’d picked up a woman at home, his family would have had her profiled, the report emailed to him before he’d even got her halfway home.

Brienne could be _anyone_. But it’s better than that – she’s no one.

“I’ll get some. From the machine in the toilets.” She pulls away, squeezes his hand as she goes. Leaves him panting against the wall. She’s red in the face with her hair sticking up in every direction. Lips pink and wet and her chin chafed by his beard.

She disappears into the ladies, digging in her pocket for change.

When she comes back, she looks relieved that he’s still there. Of course he’s still there.

She has a pack of three condoms, flavoured ones, ribbed for her pleasure. Gods, he wants to give her pleasure. She puts them in her pocket.

“Want to come back to my boat?” she asks.

XII.

The harbour is freezing – so cold it sobers them out of the mad ardour of the pub. Jaime’s left his jacket on a chair – he doesn’t think Brienne has a coat. She’s left the pig at the table.

“Where are you from?” he asks, shivering uncontrollably in the onslaught of the snow. Because he thinks that probably they should talk.

“Tarth, originally.” She’s not shivering at all, he notices. “What about you? Are you a fisherman? Not seen you here before.”

“I’m from all over,” he shrugs. He’s a man without a past, after all. “And I’ve had all sorts of jobs.”

Jobs his father had given him. Executive of this and board member of that. CEO of shell companies that only existed on paper. As tax dodges, as money laundering, probably. Ones that came with executive perks and bonus tiers and exclusive use of yachts and limos.

She nods. She doesn’t care. He’s just a man with brown hair she met in a pub on the night before Sevenmas.

XIII.

Her boat is called _Evenfall_.

She helps him aboard. He trips over a rope, and then a net. Nearly slips over on the icy deck in his cheap trainers.

He follows her below decks, silent. Down the rusty stairway, through the scruffy kitchen with the fold-out table. All formica. Everything covered in a layer of salt and grime.

It’s nothing like his father’s yacht.

XIV.

Perhaps he should have offered to take her to his motel.

She has a bunk. A single bunk with a curtain across it – she’s rigged up fairy lights inside, for Sevenmas, he presumes. There are photos on the walls, friends and dogs and family. But it’s a bunk. A rusty, squeaky, narrow metal-framed bunk.

Even worse, the bunk above them is occupied. A scruffy dark-haired kid is fast asleep; he’s probably not much older than eighteen or nineteen. “Is that your … brother?”

She shakes her head as she turns the little electric heater on. “He’s the apprentice. Don’t worry about Pod. He dislocated his knee a few days ago hauling in the nets. It’s why we’re stopped here. The doctor gave him some mega painkillers, he’s out for the count.”

Jaime’s a little unsure, until she kisses him.

Brienne’s lips are cold, but her tongue is warm. Both hands slide into his hair. She pulls out the bun and pulls back to see him with his hair falling about his face. Looking at him like he’s a secretary who has just taken her glasses off and the boss suddenly sees she’s beautiful.

She devours him. He’s never known hunger like it – never been desired like this before, for all his wealth and status. He’s never desired anyone this way himself – this feels like the most _alive_ sex he’s ever had.

She pulls him towards her bunk. Pulling his shirt off, yanking the buttons on his jeans.

He glances up at the sleeping kid – he hasn’t moved a muscle.

Fuck it, then. On her bunk it is.

XV.

They are side-by-side on her bunk. Brienne has a hand in his boxers, the other on his face.

Jaime pants helplessly at her touch – she’s strong and inelegant with his cock, but that’s a good thing, an overwhelming thing. A thing that makes him moan.

Under her jeans, she’s wearing cotton knickers with a bow. Pink cotton. He gets a hand inside to find that he was right – she’s not waxed.

She’s not waxed, and gods she’s wet. Wet and hot and welcoming. She kicks her jeans off and spreads her legs for his fingers, and he slides two of them inside her. She grinds herself against the heel of his hand, and now she’s moaning too.

XVI.

They are fucking. They are fucking hard.

He’s naked even though it’s freezing, but she’s keeping him warm. Warm thighs, warm arms around him, the friction of her body. The soft squash of her belly under his.

She’s pulled the curtain across the side of the bunk, but really, she need not have bothered – they have no hope of privacy were anyone conscious to walk in the room. One of her knees, wrapped over his arse, sticks out the gap in the curtains, and they are both making enough noise to wake the dead.

It’s too small – it’s too tight to fuck on this bunk – he’s managed to get inside her, but he can’t thrust properly. All he can do is use his toes, dug down the gap between the mattress and the bunk frame, as leverage to grind himself against her, short, hard jerks that squeak the springs and shudder the bunk.

Brienne is looking up at him with wide eyes like she can’t believe this is really happening. She has a hand on his left arse cheek, the other tangled in his hair.

She’s still in her jumper, he’s pushed it up around her neck, and her small tits bounce pleasingly with every thrust.

It’s amazing. Incredible. Unbelievable.

He’s alive.

He’s alive.

XVII.

He makes her come.

She clings to him. Bites his shoulder. Cries out noisily.

Inside, her cunt throbs with her release. Squeezing. Holding, caressing his cock base to tip.

Gods, he feels so alive.

So alive.

He’s alive.

He comes too, his orgasm a burst of blinding brilliance that surges through him. Through his legs and into his feet, curling his toes. Up his chest and down his arms and into every fingertip. He clings to Brienne, and he’s noisy, too. He’s never been noisy, not before he died.

XVIII.

Afterwards, they go to the kitchen together, and she makes him a cup of tea and a Pot Noodle. Lends him a coat of her dad’s that stinks of seaweed and absolutely swamps him.

They sit together and eat, and he curls his leg around hers under the fold-down table. She smiles a happy smile and tucks his hair behind his ear.

“Thank you,” she says. “For being my Sevenmas present this year.”

He laughs. “Is that what I am?”

She nods. “I don’t normally do this. This … sleeping with men I meet in the pub. Not that men want to sleep with me much, but … you … you’re so … beautiful.”

“You think I’m _beautiful_?” A joyous laugh bursts out of his mouth.

“Too beautiful for me,” she says, but she’s smiling with it.

He kisses her, even though he probably tastes like curry Pot Noodle. “I don’t do this, either. But you … I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”

“You have a thing for tall women who look like the back end of a bus, do you?”

He makes a face. “I love blue eyes. And freckles. And a woman I can be straightforward with.”

She smiles at that, and kisses him again.

XIX.

They are drinking their third cup of tea and dunking some spiced Sevenmas biscuits by the time Brienne’s dad gets back. He has the side of pig on his shoulder, singing at the top of his lungs. He leaps onto the boat as agile as a mountain goat.

Brienne leaps to her feet to clear some crap off the top of the chest freezer. She helps him to squeeze the pig inside.

“You could have stayed to help me,” the old man accuses with a grin. “Too busy getting your leg over to care about your dear old dad?”

Brienne rolls her eyes.

Belatedly, the old man notices Jaime.

Jaime gives him a wave.

He’s offered a big, grubby paw of a hand in return. “I’m Selwyn! “You’re still here then? Hoping to have a second go!?”

Probably not now he’s back, Jaime thinks, but he shakes the man’s hand nonetheless.

Selwyn is staring at him, peering with those bright blue eyes screwed up. He might be drunk and probably half-mad too, but something is ticking over in that head of his.

Suddenly, he claps his filthy hands together. Points at Jaime.

“I know you!” he says. “You’re the bloke from the news!”

“No, I –”

“Yes, you are. The posh bloke, the rich bloke.”

Jaime gapes. “I’m not, I – I just – I look like him. A few people have said –”

“You’ve got hair dye on your ear too, mate.” Selwyn guffaws loudly.

Jaime rubs his ear frantically.

Brienne is looking at him with very wide eyes. “Your family think you’re dead,” she says.

He looks up at them both from their kitchen table, his hands wrapped around one of their mugs. “I want them to,” he says. “Please. I don’t want any of that any more.”

Selwyn nods, and then claps Jaime on the shoulder. “Fair enough. Not like anyone would believe a drunken old sot like me anyway.”

He walks away, going for the kettle, taking a Sevenmas biscuit with him as he does.

Brienne continues to stare.

XX.

It’s dawn. Jaime is still on the _Evenfall_ , watching the sun come up on Sevenmas morning on the deck. Surrounded by snow, listening to Selwyn’s drunken singing from the kitchen below.

Brienne comes up on deck now, in a different jumper and jeans. She passes him another mug of tea. They stand together for a while, looking at the snow falling onto the ocean.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says at last.

She shrugs. “It would have been stupid to tell me. I could have turned you in and asked your rich dad for a reward.”

He grins. “Well, thanks for not doing that.”

She fidgets for a moment before lifting her head to look into his eyes. He gets the impression she is trying to be courageous.

“My dad said you can stay,” she says.

“Stay?”

She nods. “If you want to. We don’t get into port much and when we do you could stay on the boat if you wanted. It might make it easier to hide, for now at least, until you’re all forgotten.”

“What you mean like … he’s offering me a job? As a fisherman?”

“Yeah. I could train you up – you’re fit and strong, you could do it. Pod will probably be off his feet for a few months anyway. You get a share of the profits, and it’s pretty much off the grid, as my dad’s unpaid parking fines prove.”

He’s astonished. Bowled over. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Just an offer,” she says after he says nothing for a while. “And never mind what happened last night, we can put that behind us.”

“I don’t want to.”

She shrugs. “Fair enough. I thought I’d ask, though, in case –”

“No. I mean, I don’t want to put what happened last night behind us.”

“Oh.”

“And … yes. I’ll take the job. Thank you. Thanks to your dad as well, that’s –”

“Really?”

“Of course really! Gods, that’s … that’s so wonderful, so exciting, so good of him. And of you.”

“It’ll be nice to have you around,” she says, and she reaches out to him again, tucking his long hair back behind his ear.

XXI.

The bells in the sept are ringing for Sevenmas, and Jaime and Brienne walk through White Harbour.

Selwyn walks beside them, still singing, still drunk, carrying Jaime’s rucksack full of cheap clothes he bought in the weeks before he pretended to die. Jaime has his suitcase. Brienne takes his boots.

The snow falls all around them. Brienne is smiling. Jaime is smiling. It truly feels like Sevenmas.

He slips his hand into Brienne’s.

He’s done it. He’s dead. He’s alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to diesis for the great prompt, I had so much fun with it and I hope that you like the results!
> 
> Many thanks are also due to CaptainTarthister and Jencat for the help and support and the read-throughs, you are absolute champions and I am so very grateful.
> 
> Also three festive cheers to slipsthrufingers for organising the exchange. Super excited about this as both a writer and a reader!


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